Word: shigeto
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Late that night, Shigeto reached home to find his wife and two children safe. But his reunion was a brief one. Five of his 27 colleagues at the hospital had been killed in the blast; for the next two months Shigeto was so busy treating survivors that he could not return home to visit his family...
Deadly Radiation. Like most Hiroshimans, Shigeto wondered what kind of a weapon could have wrought such havoc on his city. But unlike most, he had an idea. On the second day after the explosion, he had some X-ray plates brought up from the hospital's storeroom, still in their lead case. When he found that all of them had been fogged, he remembered an article he had once read in a science magazine and concluded that his city had been hit by an atom bomb...
That knowledge was of little help in treating the bomb victims. Doctors at that time had only scanty knowledge about the effects of atomic radiation. But Shigeto and his colleagues soon became experts. Within weeks after the blast, patients began turning up at the hospital complaining tearfully that their hair had fallen out overnight. Their hair eventually grew back, but other problems remained. Doctors began to notice an increasing incidence of leukemia, a cancer of the blood-forming cells. Over the years, they have found among Hiroshimans a greater than normal occurrence of other cancers as well...
...Shigeto became head of the city's Red Cross Hospital in 1948 and assumed the directorship of the newly built Atomic Bomb Memorial Hospital in 1956. But he still found time to treat bomb victims. "I'm a bedside physician," he said. "It's my duty to do all I can for them." His patients were reassured by his calm, Buddha-like demeanor. Said a woman suffering from a bomb-induced cancer, "I feel relieved each time he even smiles...
Like most Hiroshimans, Shigeto is a pacifist. He believes that "the nobility of human spirit will surely prevent" another Hiroshima. "Isn't it strange," he says, "that the worst disaster in human history should have turned me into a helpless optimist?" Indeed, despite his city's ordeal, Shigeto has been so impressed by the strength and courage displayed by Hiroshima's victims that he has unbounded faith in man's prospects for survival. That feeling was bolstered recently when he learned that the first two victims he treated after the blast are still alive today...